The Fading Light
by SubspaceNinja
Summary: When one wakes up with no memory and all of their fears become reality, what is one to do? Accept death? No. How can one accept death without understanding why they need to. This is the story of one man's search for the truth behind the insanity.  Part 1


The man was silent as he crept inside the dark, eerie chamber. His lantern, half emptied of oil, was dimming, and he was beginning to lose his mind, thinking he could see things and that monsters were moving in the distance of the chamber. He'd seen them before, the monsters. They were ugly and pale, their jaws ripped open at one side with their slimey tongue tangling out. Their hands were more like flippers, and their faces, other than the broken jaw, were reminiscent of a pit bull's. When they walked through rooms, they made weird groaning sounds as they checked every single corner of the room, but their vision was not good enough to tell if the man was hiding in the shadows of a corner, or if it was just a sack of potatoes. Often the man would faint at the sight of the monsters coming closer to him, but this usually worked in his favour, making the monsters think that he was but another dead body they could add to their list of lifeless corpses.

As the man steadily crept his way further into the chamber, he could hear the rustling of rusty chains and the creaking of century-old wooden floorboards, causing his heartbeat to increase and his head to pound. "A slight headache" he thought to himself, as he carried on, convincing himself it was nothing. His lantern, still producing light, made it possible for the man to see a piece of parchment left on top of a small fireplace. As the man hesitantly made his way towards the fireplace, he began to hear noises in his head, noises of people talking, woman and children mumbling and the sound of hurried feet across the floor above. "How is it that I can hear this?" he asked himself. "This place has been uninhabited for hundreds of years."  
>Disregarding these sounds, he reached the fireplace and began staring at the parchment. It was a note, a note that seemed to have been written by someone who had either been in a hurry, or just had terrible handwriting, but the man managed to make out the words as he began reading it.<p>

"Dear *unreadable scribble*,  
>you may be very confused as to your current situation, but fear not, it is all in your head. The monsters, however, I could never figure out. They seemed to be some form of my imagination, but they were as real and lifelike as any man, woman or child I had ever seen before.<br>Do not be distracted by the sounds, do not be distracted by your vision, and do not be distracted by your touch. Your mind is tricking you into believing things that are not real, it was a minor side effect of the tonic, but we shall get to that at a later point. Carry on your path to the outhouse, stop only to hide, but be quick, for there may not be much time left.  
>Yours sincearly, a former close friend."<p>

The man, standing in awe next to the fireplace, was trying to wrap his head around what he had just read. What was this tonic? And why did he have to get to the outhouse as fast as possible? Perhaps these questions were to be answered later, or perhaps they were questions that were never meant to be answered by such a valueless piece of parchment. All of a sudden, the man froze, his eyes slightly shaking and staring at the wall, shocked. He slowly turned his body around to face what he had feared, and what stared back at him was the worst he could have imagined. A monster stood, seemingly lifeless apart from its breathing and groans, looking right at the man's direction, but it seemed as if it could not see him. It waited there, groaning, its tongue causing saliva to drip to the floor and its flipper-like arms dangling at its side.  
>The man's eyes began to blur, and as the monster turned to walk back up the dark staircase to the previous room, the man fell to his knees, his head pounding almost as quickly as his heart now was. The man had now blacked out. <p>


End file.
